The Kibitzer

The Times They Are A-Changin

“Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you don’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’ — Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize laureate

How to make sense of it? It’s like we’ve been living at a beachfront resort, sipping mai tais on the sand, when a tsunami swept in and laid waste to everything that was familiar and safe. Suddenly the world is upside down and unrecognizable. A seismic recalibration of everything we know and hold dear. And its cuts so deep. People can’t get out of bed. Friends are outraged and drawing battle lines against each other. Minorities are fearing for their lives. And blacks just say now you know what we’ve been living with all these years!

It’s the Divisive State of America, and it is a dark time and place. The worst of all of us has come out in Donald J Trump. How could he say the things he said? Why didn’t more women vote him down? Well, perhaps they are numb to the vulgarities of men. Maybe they’ve heard it all before, late night and every day – at work, at home, and on TV, and he was just refreshingly real at a time when they were desperate for change.

This is our moral 9/11, as Thomas Friedman said. But I believe America is about to shine brightest. It’s always darkest before the light. In a way, this had to happen. Four years of Hillary would have made us safe, but somnambulant, just floating down the lazy river on the party boat, unaware of the waterfall ahead. But now people are waking up, getting off the couch, writing impassioned posts, staging peaceful demonstrations, talking to their kids, seeking spiritual guidance, connecting with nature, and re-assessing what’s important in life. They are defending human rights and the environment, postponing frivolous purchases, and getting real.

We are going to experience a renaissance, a flowering of human potential that can only birth from cataclysmic events. A new forest grows only when old, decayed and diseased growth burns to the ground. And it will be beautiful and caring and enlightened and in just in time to reverse the sickening spiral of the human species from the death grip of greed.

Donald Trump represents nothing more than the last act of our reptilian core. He is a carny act, a bottom feeding, low vibration being, reflecting our craven instinct to kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. He is in all of us. He is a cry for survival from those who feel unheard.

There is no percentage in speculating what he will do and what it will mean. Because we have the ultimate power. It’s always been that way. Remember injustices that have been struck down by the people? Slavery? Gone. Gay rights? Done. A woman’s right to choose?? Hell yeah. Equal rights? Yep. Marijuana legal? Finally. We have headed in the right direction in the 50 years since Dylan wrote that song and the 60’s ushered in a new consciousness. This little hiccup in the spectrum of time, this bump in the road of human evolution, will soon be roadkill in the rear view of enlightenment. Has to happen, because we know we are better than this. In fact, how great was it to hear LA Police Chief Charlie Beck say the LAPD would not help Trump deport immigrants! The people united can never be defeated. And that includes the police and military, too.

It’s our children who will lead the way out of this. They always do. It’s young people who have already taken to the streets and put Trump on notice. They will be voting in four years, many more of them than now. They are decidedly progressive, support human rights, social diversity, and saving our planet. And they are waking up, thanks in great measure to Bernie Sanders. The great lethargy of social media and dumbed down, pleasure-at-all-costs society, is dissolving into people connecting with one another and sharing real pain and emotion again. They are waking from their gilded slumbers and developing inner capacities for empathy, compassion, hope and action.

Ultimately this starts with you, parents. It is you who must teach your children that language is violence, that love trumps hate, that we are all one, interconnected planet. That ignorance, fear, intolerance and bigotry is not the way forward. It is you who must teach that civil disobedience is the most patriotic thing they can do, that to have a voice in a democracy they must use it. When we see our children finally join their elders at weekend demonstrations on Main Beach, we know our future is bright.

In the meantime, for your own sanity, here are some things to help reconnect to yourself, find your power and your inner peace. Turn off the news and get out in nature, where everything makes sense. Make or consume art, where everything is illuminated. Meditate, where everything is nothing. And do some good for others, where everything matters. The journey to enlightenment has just begun.

Billy Fried hosts “Laguna Talks” on Thursday nights at 8 p.m. on KX 93.5, and can be reached at [email protected].